Chert hafted hide scraper from the Bering Strait, Alaska. The retouched flake was fitted into an ergonomic handle carved from wood, and was likely made and used in the late 19th Century.
See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.
This scraper is made from a large flake of fine-grained brown and blue-grey chert. Edward Nelson observed chert scrapers of similar colours at Point Hope in 1887-1881, and this tool may have come from that region. The dorsal surface of the flake was thinned and contoured by invasive percussion flaking, probably by soft-hammer flaking technique. A bulge on the flake’s ventral surface was also thinned and flattened by invasive percussion flaking, resulting in a bifacial edge along that side of the flake. The end of the flake was very steeply retouched by unifacial pressure flaking. The edge shows considerable microflaking from use, and rounding and polish is visible under magnification. The outstanding feature of this tool is the expertly designed wood handle. The wood is smooth and highly polished from use, and black residue has accumulated in the deeper recesses. The top of the tool has patinated to a brown colour, but the front and underside of the tool are lighter-coloured, perhaps due to the incidental contact of these surfaces with the hide. Two grooves for the first (index) and second (middle) fingers are carved into the top of the handle. These fingers provide the downward pressure onto the working edge of the scraper. A deep groove on the left is for the thumb, and the recess is contoured towards the distal end of the tool to accomodate the pad of the thumb. The third (ring) and fourth (pinkie) fingers rest side-by-side in a deep angled recess carved into the underside of the handle. The handle is exceptionally comfortable to hold, and the top and side grooves are reminiscent of an ergonomically-designed computer mouse. The scraper was inserted into a slot in the handle. It is held in place by a hard glue-like substance mixed with what appears to be sawdust. Glue or mastic was rarely used by Inuit people, and this glue was probably added later by a collector or conservator to better secure the stone scraper into the handle.
Hafted scraper showing hand position.
Flaked stone and ground stone cutting tools were both used by Indigenous people across the coastal Arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere. In Alaska and Canada, these tools continued to be used into the late 19th and early 20th Century.
From 1877-1881 the American ethnologist Edward Nelson recorded in detail the traditional tools and technology of Inuit people living on the Alaska side of the Bering Strait, publishing the book The Eskimo about Bering Strait in 1900. He made his observations while employed by the US Army Signal Corps; men with scientific training, including Nelson and the naturalist John Muir, were selected by the Signal Corp to make observations in these remote regions. Nelson observed that stone tools were largely replaced by iron tools obtained by the Inuit from Russian traders, although stone—particularly slate—was still widely used for some tasks, such as processing fish and scraping hides.
Mammal skins were crucially important for survival in the Arctic, and according to Nelson, the most important tool for processing them was the hide scraper. In southwestern Alaska, the flaked stone or ground slate scraper was lashed with spruce root onto an and elongated handle, but from Kotzebue Sound northward the scraper handles were short and elaborately carved to fit the hand. The handles observed by Nelson were shaped from wood, walrus ivory, or fossil mammoth ivory, and the stone scraper was inserted into a slot carved into the handle.
Scrapers were used to remove fat and adhering flesh from the underside of the hide, and stone worked well for this because it was less likely than steel to accidentally pierce the skin. As observed by Nelson, once the underside was scraped, the hide was rolled with the hair side inward and stored until the hair loosened. The hide was then unrolled and the hair was scraped off. The hide was next affixed to a drying frame made of driftwood, scraped again, and set in the sun to dry. Tanning was done by soaking the hide in urine prior to stretching, final scraping, and drying. Certain skins—particularly reindeer—were scraped again after drying to break the grain and make the hide pliable. Elaborate methods were used to produce specially-tanned and coloured leather for Inuit clothing. According to Nelson, both Inuit men and women used scrapers to process hides—they were not exclusively a woman’s tool. Men and women often worked together to process large mammal skins, such as seals, walrus, reindeer, wolves, wolverines, and bears. Women tended to scrape the hides from smaller animals, such as hares, muskrats, marmots, waterfowl, and reindeer fawns.
